The Catholic conundrum named Francis — Now we have a relatively new pope who has expressed the heretical (to conservatives) notion that unfettered capitalism is not a guarantor of freedom, prosperity, or human dignity. He’s even suggested economic inequality is a more important concern for the church, and humanity, than condemning gay people or women who use contraception. Kind of like how Jesus talked a lot about the poor, and not so much about the gay menace. Huh. Who knew? Judging by their words and deeds, certainly not the Catholic church in the America, or the American Evangelical community, nor a lot of other denominations.

Surrender Douthat! — On the conservative Christian trope that an incremental loss of privilege from absolute cultural supremacy to merely overwhelming dominance counts as persecution, especially in the area of marriage equality. I’ve often wondered whether, as gays and gay marriage become more mainstream and, well, banal, many Christians won’t find themselves wondering why the apocalypse hasn’t come after all and what that says about Scriptural authority in a lot of other areas. That’s what’s not sitting well with a lot of Christian culture warriors right now.

Sale of Guns Soar Following Election — Because the Obama administration did so much to curb gun rights during his first term. Or not. This is another example of what I keep saying — liberal-progressives fear conservatives because of what conservatives themselves say they will do, conservatives fear liberal-progressives because of what conservatives themselves imagine those liberal-progressives might do. It’s just another facet of the endless GOP War on Reality.

The religious liberty right to believe that algebra is an abortifacient — Say you have a public school student who is an observant Jew. That student has a reasonable religious liberty objection to being offered only school lunches containing pork. But what if this student were to refuse school lunches containing beef, asserting that he believes beef to come from pigs and therefore to violate his religious commitment to keeping kosher. Does the school have an obligation to accommodate the delusional belief that beef comes from pigs? Tyndale House says yes. The Christian publisher says it has a right to its own sectarian facts and sectarian reality, and that no such thing as objective truth exists that might constrain that.Slacktivist Fred Clark with more on the endless lunacy that is the Religious Right. And remember, these nuts are the backbone of the GOP. Every time you vote Republican, you’re voting to further empower this intellectual cesspool as a prime mover in American government and policy.

Why Marco Rubio Needs To Know That The Earth Is Billions Of Years Old — [T]his economy, at its root, is built on a web of scientific knowledge from physics to chemistry to biology. It’s impossible to just cherry pick out parts we don’t like. If the Earth is 9,000 years old, then virtually the entire construct of modern science is simply wrong. Not only that, most of the technology that we rely on most likely wouldn’t work – as they’re dependent on science that operates on the same physical laws that demonstrate the age of the universe. Speaking of the intellectual cesspool that is the Religious Right. (Via Slacktivist Fred Clark.)

Walter Russell Mead and the “Fretting” Realists — Conservative commentator Daniel Larison on Obama’s likely cabinet changes. [A]voiding groupthink and excessive uniformity [in the Cabinet] would be desirable no matter what the prevailing view happened to be. While quite true and to the point, this is an odd comment, to say the least, coming from a conservative. The Republican collection of intellectual and policy litmus tests, and their ferocious punishment of any of their own who stray, make the old bugaboo of “political correctness” look like a playground game. Thanks to figures such as Rush Limbaugh and Grover Norquist, as well the eternal pandering to their deeply irrational and paranoid base, the GOP is about nothing if not about groupthink and uniformity.

The One True Faith — Scenes From a Multiverse captures the snarky version of the atheist view of religion brilliantly.

A Year in Jail for Not Believing in God? How Kentucky is Persecuting Atheists — In Kentucky, a homeland security law requires the state’s citizens to acknowledge the security provided by the Almighty God–or risk 12 months in prison. The headline and lede overstate this story, but the reality is only slightly less appalling. For a bunch of people who claim to love the Constitution so much, conservatives sure do have a lot of hate for the First Amendment’s position on religion. (Via threeoutside.)

Won Direction — Bill Maher with some thoughts for president Obama. (Via my Aunt M.)

Poetic justice: Romney likely to finish at 47 percent — If Romney ran a campaign of unprecedented dishonesty and lack of transparency, virtually all of it was geared towards misleading people about the true nature of his — and his party’s — actual beliefs and governing agenda. If? What if? Romney absolutely ran a campaign of unprecedented dishonesty and lack of transparency. That’s objectively true on the plain face of the facts. That’s something his own campaign team bragged about. What if?

It’s The Racism, Stupid — [Conservative beliefs about race, class and sexuality] make you a jerk, no matter how nice you phrase it. When your position is that of denying others their piece of the American dream because you just plain don’t like them, you are a jerk. It’s really just that damned simple. You. Are. A. Bigot. It’s kind of hard to manufacture more angry white men, the GOP’s key electoral strategy for decades, without inflammatory rhetoric. And if you say something long enough, you tend to come to believe it.

Procedures aren’t the GOP’s problem — If Republicans want to stop taking losing positions on issues, they need to find a way to downplay those things they believe strongly in despite their unpopularity and to give up those things they don’t really care about. As all successful political parties do. But that’s not going to happen when everyone is terrified of charges of moderation. Yes. You know who else was a moderate? HITLER! And STALIN!! And MAO!!! Moderation is the road to MADNESS!!!! Only absolute conservative ideologically purity can maintain the American tradition of a free and open society!!!

Worth Noting — Josh Marshall on the GOP’s mania over Susan Rice and the Benghazi attacks. The actual work of government oversight is significantly impeded by endless pandering to nonsensical conspiracies theories or people who need clinical intervention. Which pretty much describes the entire GOP these days rather nicely.

?otD: After ten long years, they let you out of the home. What did you do next?

Researcher wants nanotech patent moratorium — Claims advances in the field are “being stifled at birth.” What this really means is that other countries will make substantial advances with huge economic and technological implications while here in the US the whole field dicks around in court.

Monsanto insurance: USDA tells farmers to pay for avoiding troubles with agro-giant — the best maneuver for any Monsanto foe to take right now is to simply buy insurance, suggesting that the top guns will be given the go-ahead to continue with their contested habit of near endless litigation, a practice that has a tendency to leave the little guys bankrupt and out of business — only to be bought up by the billion-dollar Monsanto corporation after their bills can’t be paid. In other words, give up, ordinary citizens, you can’t fight the abuses of corporate America. Btw, if you’re a conservative, this is what your beloved industry self-regulation looks like. Profit optimization at the expense of everyone and everything. Sort of like my relationship to the Google Books Settlement, actually. (Via danjite.)

The Very First Americans — Newt Gingrich honors the original migrants over the Bering Strait land bridge 15,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. No, wait, never mind. He’s talking about white people 400 years ago. Apparently no one before then was American. All those ones that came before? Illegals. Ask any conservative.

The Real ‘Evangelical Disaster’ — The great evangelical disaster is that evangelicalism has become synonymous with Republicanism rather than the gospel of Jesus Christ. Yup. Atwater and Ailes needed a reliable voting bloc back in the late 1970s, and you guys eagerly signed up. That’s why almost two entire generations of young and middle-aged Americans can casually dismiss Christianity as a source of hatred and vitriol, because your leaders sold your souls for a mess of pottage. (Via Slacktivist Fred Clark.)

Police officer quits after comments about Barack Obama — When questioned by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office integrity unit, he said he also didn’t care if a nuclear explosion killed everyone in the Northeastern U.S because they supported Obama. Remember, this dingbat Republican creep had a badge and a gun and powers of arrest. Stay classy, conservative America. It’s what you do best.

The New Republicans — There has been a lot of talk since the election about the possible emergence of a new faction within the Republican party, or at least among the conservative intelligentsia. These new Republicans, we’re told, are willing to be more open-minded on cultural issues, more understanding of immigrants, and more skeptical that trickle-down economics is enough; they’ll favor direct measures to help working families. So what should we call these new Republicans? I have a suggestion: why not call them “Democrats”?

The GOP’s Voter Suppression Strategy — That’s what you do when you can’t win on ideas. Assuming that you lack integrity, intellectual honesty or any commitment to the democratic process. Gee, which party are we talking about, again?

What Can Obama Do About Climate Change? — The President faces a divided Congress, but has some powerful tools to limit carbon emissions. The existence of climate change never should have been an issue, except for the “anything to piss off the liberals” ethos of conservatives intersecting with their shameful but powerful reflexive anti-science instincts. (Thanks to decades of boosting evolution denial as a troll for the Ignorant-American vote.) What we should have been arguing about all along is solutions and approaches, not choose-your-own-facts reality distortions.

The Real Real America — [O]ne big thing that just happened was that the real America trumped the “real America”. And it’s also the election that lets us ask, finally, “Who cares what’s the matter with Kansas?”

More Election Thoughts — I can understand voting against this president, but as I watched the speech I thought, This is the man that millions of people are libeling as unamerican, a socialist, an outsider. This good, thoroughly American man. Voting against him is fine; pretending he’s a radical unamerican outsider is false and vicious. Welcome to conservative America, where pretense is truth and reality is sneeringly dismissed as having a liberal bias. (Via Slacktivist Fred Clark.)

Kay Bailey Hutchison says GOP is “tainted” by candidates saying “very stupid things” — Ah, Republican Senator Hutchison is one of my favorite long time political crooks. Years ago, her Texas corruption trial was ended by a bizarre judicial ruling that could only be explained by a political fix or rank incompetence from the bench, as it was certainly independent of any precedent or rule of law. The fix paid off handsomely for her, as Senator Hutchison went on with a long career.

Election leaves Republicans at a loss for answers — I’m pretty certain the GOP won’t learn anything constructive (or good for the future of the country) from this. Not when they have Hurricane Sandy to blame. Note that the numbers pace Nate Silver, don’t substantiate that theory at all. But we all know what conservatives think of Nate Silver, so it’s not like they’re going to start listening to him, or the data in general, now.

Karl Rove: Obama Succeeded ‘By Suppressing The Vote’ — A rather bizarre assertion from one of the standard bearers of the party that explicitly staked its electoral fortunes on wide scale voter suppression through voter ID laws and limiting early voting. Project much, Karl? I think he’s still pissed that Husted’s Ohio voting fix didn’t pay off for Romney.

Voter Suppression Backfires — Ta-Nehisi Coates on the very public, wholesale voter suppression efforts of the GOP. You, the ones Karl Rove is now projecting on Democrats.

Adviser: Romney “shellshocked” by loss — One disadvantage of resigning from the reality-based community is that reality can really surprise you. My personal theory, however, is that the GOP really thought they had the fix in for Ohio and Pennsylvania and Florida, with the voter ID laws and the early voting restrictions. Regardless of the actual votes, there would be enough problems with voting machines and ballots to either jimmy the tally or provide the foundation for Bush v. Gore type lawsuits. In Pennsylvania, the Republican leadership said as much, that the new voter ID law would bring home the state for Romney. Obama winning by large enough margins to overwhelm their cheating simply wasn’t an option in their view. If you think I’m completely full of it on this notion, consider Karl Rove’s reaction to the FOX News call for Ohio. That’s the reaction of a man who was completely confident of a different outcome.